Hello everyone.

My company recently upgraded to Solidworks 2012 from the 2009 version we had used for several years. In the 2009 version, Solidworks had both Photoview 360 and Photoworks integrated into it, and I used Photoworks for all my rendering. I have a need to do some more rendering of our products, and I'm having trouble getting the hang of Photoview 360. It almost seems to be less useful than Photoworks was. It takes several minutes just to render an image, which was the case with Photoworks, but in PW, it would render each block section completley before moving on to the next whereas Photoview renders the whole entire thing at once, making it take much much longer in order for me to see what a final rendered area of my model is going to look like. They've also removed the ability to select a square section to render which I would frequently do just to see the changes I'd made with various light settings instead of rendering the entire model.

What does everyone think? Is Photoview 360 more useful, or less? Am I just experiencing a learning curve, or should I look into installing 2009 back on my system to use the integrated Photoworks?

Also, is anybody aware of any Photoview 360 resources that might help me learn the software better?